Faith Venus Blood Moon review

Faith guitars are built in Indonesia and designed by legendary British guitar maker, Patrick James Eggle.

The brand has a reputation for modern, detailed, high-quality guitars for those of us who can't quite stretch to a Taylor or Martin, but this model has a price tag that's pushing into the territory of those big two brands, so what gives?

Well, while Martin and Taylor do offer guitars at this price point, the spec this Blood Moon puts those in the shade. For example, it includes a hard case (with humidifier to stop the wood drying out) and it's made of solid wood: Indonesian trembesi to be precise, a koa/mahogany-alike hardwood.

It's pretty fancy, too - with a notable bold, wavy grain - yet even with figured maple binding and gold tuners it somehow avoids looking 'posh'. We'd call it classy.

Faith calls it a Venus shape, an 'OM/Auditorium', based size-wise on Martin's classic OM/000. It's actually very slightly bigger than Martin's OM/000, although in depth it's noticeably deeper - closer to Taylor's Grand Concert, with which it shares more spot-on dimensions.

If that depth gives an impression, played seated, of a bigger guitar, the mahogany neck reinforces that with quite a meaty profile and near-jumbo, electric- like frets as opposed to the smaller wires we find on numerous other acoustic brands.

To complement a very tidy build, we have a Shadow Nanoflex under-saddle pickup and side-mounted Faith-branded Shadow Performer Tuner preamp featuring volume, bass and treble rotaries, a push-button phase control to slightly alter bass response and importantly at higher volume reject feedback, plus a push-button for the onboard tuner, with its micro-sized LED display.

It's very accurate but not easy to see - bright LEDs aside - in low stage-level lighting. With spruce X-bracing designed by Patrick, and very tidily installed by the look and feel of it, hardwood tops like this always give us a different voice to that of spruce.

A little less wide perhaps in its frequency response, there's also a subtle compression here as you strum hard with a pick, but that's a positive: big open chords sound exactly that. There's plenty of air at the bridge to make more delicate fingerpicking easy, too, although your thumb has to work quite hard to get those low strings driving.

Into a small PA we have a pretty representation of the acoustic sound and there's no shortage of low-end, which needs a little trimming either onboard from the effective EQ or outboard. It's also a little clouded in the lower mids; a little outboard tweak here certainly improved the performance.